Erlang is one of a few languages that are designed from the ground up for distributed programming, in this case from the functional programmers camp.

An imperative example is CxC (a C/C++ ish language), which seems to be more aimed for number crunching while Erlang has a focus on networking and reliable operation.

Erlang is the only functional language, where I have not the feeling that it is just an academic toy. This is because it is used in heavy real world apps in the telecommunications area.
It comes with lots of cool ideas and apps, among it a distributed database.
I wish the documentation would be more suited to newcomers, but that is just a matter of time.

I disagree that it would be hard to find Erlang coders.
Ever looked at the Zope sources and then claiming that Python is easy?
I would rather stick the effort into learning the Erlang base language. :)